


see me in hindsight

by openhearts



Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: Dubious Consent, F/M, Fuck Or Die, Hurt/Comfort, Virginity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-28
Updated: 2017-10-28
Packaged: 2019-01-25 14:57:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12534304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openhearts/pseuds/openhearts
Summary: Set in a stretched out timeline of season 2 while Freddie and Kate are doing their CSI: Culebras schtick, obviously before Oculto and the saddest kneecap-threatening breakup (until season 3 anyway).I started this in October 2015 and it became a beast that I've picked up on and off over the last 2+ years, scaled up and back, and couldn't figure out how to end for at least a year.  But here we finally are, with apparently the first Freddie/Kate non-& fic on ao3?  So that's cool.  It finally feels done.Thank you to Shannon my beta and Taylah and a few other #sinsquad buddies for their feedback.  All mistakes are mine and I'm first posting this from mobile so bear with me if there are formatting errors, I'll fix them.  Title from Taylor Swift's Wildest Dreams.





	see me in hindsight

**Author's Note:**

> This fic contains multiple sex acts that happen with dubious consent of both partners because of a fuck-or-die scenario. Please heed the tags and click away if that's not what you're here for.

When she comes to he’s the first thing she sees. 

“Freddie?”

Her voice shakes, adrenaline coursing through her veins. He’s sitting upright on the floor with his back to the wall, wrists in iron shackles, head hanging low. She takes a quick inventory of herself but she can’t feel anything strange aside from the throbbing in her head and blooming bruises from being held down. 

She remembers coming with Freddie to the address they’d found in one of the old case files they were going through, sniping good-naturedly at each other about food wrappers in Freddie’s truck from the lunch they’d grabbed on the way. They’d gotten maybe halfway through scoping out the abandoned warehouse when there was a sudden blow to the back of Kate’s head, then darkness.

When she’d started to wake up later there were hands holding her mouth closed, hands holding her down, and she resisted the urge to scream once she realized there were voices chanting, words she needed to try hear. It was in English for once, but that was hardly a comfort once the words sunk in. A curse read over Freddie, a demon summoned and trapped in some container. To be trapped inside him. To be expelled only one way, no magic words or amulets or animal sacrifice. Before she passed out again she managed to turn her head and saw Freddie held down too, too far away for her to reach, and their eyes locked for a few long seconds before one of their captors pried open Freddie’s mouth and poured something in - liquid, but slithering on its own down his throat while he struggled - before everything went black again. 

Then there was nothing until waking up in this room with stone walls and floor, and one heavily locked steel door.

Her hands are tied behind her back but the knots aren’t good and once she’s free she nearly slides across the cold stone floor on her knees to get to him, crouching next to him and shaking his shoulders first, then taking his face in her hands still trembling slightly.

“Freddie can you hear me?”

His eyes roll in their sockets, pupils dilated so they look even darker than their usual dark brown. He focuses on her, but only after a long moment, the painful twist in his brow easing slowly when he recognizes her. Kate runs a hand over his sweaty brow gently.

“Freddie, it’s me, it’s Kate.”

“Okay?” he asks, nearly slurred, brow furrowing again as he grows agitated trying to focus on her. “They got me, couldn’t get to you . . . you okay, Kate?”

“I know, I’m okay. Freddie? They . . . they didn’t hurt me, I’m okay.” She swallows around the lump in her throat. She’s not sure now if he remembers what happened before he passed out. “How do you feel?”

“S’like I’m drunk but different. M’hot.” 

He shakes his head and tests the chains connecting the shackles around his wrists to the walls but nothing happens. He lets out a yell of frustration and Kate jumps a little and shivers. She sits back and runs her hands through her hair nervously.

“Do you remember them giving you anything?” she asks tentatively.

It’s cowardly, trying to lead him into the memory instead of just explaining to him what she remembers herself, but she can’t make the words come out, hasn’t yet been able to deal with them being true herself. Part of her is still hoping there’s some other way.

“Knocked me out. I think somebody hit me in the head with a bat,” Freddie mutters, sounding offended at that on top of everything else, and Kate smiles briefly through her fear, reaches out and cradles his head in her hands, rubs her thumbs gently at his temples. 

Freddie leans into the touch and there’s something so entirely vulnerable about the gesture, so unlike how he usually carries himself, that it makes Kate falter and draw back slightly. His eyes snap open and they’re not just dilated they’re black from his pupils to just outside the irises and something like a growl rises slowly in his throat as he lurches forward, toward Kate, until the chains rattle and clatter and she snatches her hands away and scrambles back.

“Freddie!”

His eyes flicker brown again, his face hazy and confused as he blinks slowly, shaking his head. The chains clink and then creak. Freddie’s focusing on her again, just barely, head lolled back against the wall as he shakes it weakly. His eyes are fully his own again, and she sees it when the memory hits him, watches his face fall and then start to tighten in anger and fear. 

He’s remembered, then.

“Kate-”

“It’s going to be okay-”

“No. No, they can’t make you do this-”

“No one’s making me,” she murmurs, cheeks burning hot at how that sounds.

“There has to be another way. I can-”

“What?” she asks, shaking her head. She glances at his hands held out level in height with his shoulders, his arms stretched far enough that he can’t even reach the side of his face, let alone anywhere else. “You can’t really take care of this yourself, can you?”

He cringes slightly and she closes her eyes for a moment.

“If that poison stays inside you it’s gonna turn you into a monster. We know how to get it out so that doesn’t happen. I’m here, and I can help. We have to get out of here, and I can’t do that without you. We have to try.”

Finally Freddie nods slowly. Kate bows her head, concentrates on her breathing for a moment to try to screw up the courage for what has to come next. 

“It’s okay,” she repeats, her voice cracking into a whisper. She’s not sure if he hears her. Not sure if she was even talking to him.

She tries to smile reassuringly as she moves closer, closer until she’s in his space, taking his face in her hands and stroking his cheeks even when he flinches away at first. Tears sting in her eyes and panic grabs her throat hard and squeezes. She drops her hands to his shoulders now and she tries to gather some strength from him like she could before, let his sturdiness ground her. Now he’s limp and not himself and it just feels like she’s about to drag them both over the edge of a cliff.

“It’s okay,” she repeats. “I’m gonna help you.”

She scoots as close as she can until she’s sitting with her legs folded under her next to him, their hips pressed together, and keeps one hand on his shoulder while she forces the other to slide down his chest. Freddie sucks in a breath and she averts her eyes to stare at the wall over his shoulder when she reaches his jeans with her fingertips, and she finds herself holding her breath when she moves her hand further down to palm at his crotch through his jeans. He’s already hard, she realizes after a moment, and she gasps and her eyes fly to his before she can stop herself to find him with his head hanging low, not looking at her.

“Is it the-” she starts to ask.

“Yeah.”

“Oh,” she murmurs, looking down but carefully keeping her gaze above his waist. She has no timeline for how long it could take for the poison to take over fully, to burn Freddie up from the inside out until there’s nothing left of him, nothing to combat a monster that she'll have no chance of fighting, chains or none.

Kate takes a deep breath and wills her hands to stop shaking as she undoes the button and fly of his jeans and pull them open. Her fingertips duck into the slit in his boxers when his hips twitch away as much as he can and he shifts slower now against the chains holding his wrists.

“Try to relax,” she murmurs. 

She bows her head and closes her eyes. His skin is soft and fevered and he’s hard, twitching under her first tentative touches. She slides her fingers lower and up again, blindly makes a loose fist and squeezes gently and when he groans tightly she bites her lip hard. Her cheeks are burning hot, almost matching the heat on Freddie’s skin.

“Can you . . . how should I-?”

“Just keep . . . like you were.”

“Okay.”

She catches his eye and then they end up staring at each other as she wraps her hand around him and he exhales, gaze sharpening and falling to her mouth when she nervously tugs her lip between her teeth again. 

He swallows and nods, murmuring, “that’s good.”

She doesn’t feel like she should look but when Freddie closes his eyes she does and she can’t stop the little sound that falls from her throat at the sight of him, bare and straining in her hand as she moves carefully. She grips and tugs a little harder and shifts closer on her knees and Freddie leans into her, dropping his head down to tip against hers. His breathing gets heavier and grows into soft groans with every exhale and Kate moves faster, her own breaths starting to shorten with the tension, the slight exertion, the intense heat rolling off of him and into her. Suddenly he’s groaning louder and longer through gritted teeth, slick hot come spurts over her fist, and he drops his head back against the wall with a thump. Her eyes fly up and she stares at the veins standing out on his neck. Her mouth waters. She keeps going until he’s trembling, shivering under her touch and shaking his head for her to stop.

She carefully lets go and pulls her hand away after a few moments, not sure what to do with it covered in dripping trails of his come. She has a strange compulsion to lick her fingers clean.

“Did it help?” she manages to ask, still a little breathless, and when Freddie catches her eye he gives her a look; heated, a twist of his mouth, and his eyes widened as if daring her to figure it out for herself. 

She wants to grin back, wants to laugh and press her mouth to his like that could be normal for them. She always liked the way his mouth could turn down at the corners in an upside down little smile, dimples creasing his cheeks and his eyes glinting. That smile disarmed her, pulled her in and let her know he was teasing in his deadpan way. Now there’s a fist of wrongness in her gut wrapped around every bit of comfort she used to draw from Freddie’s presence, clenching and twinging and setting off a chorus of voices reminding her that none of this now is real, none of it is for her, none of it is anything but a sick and terrible curse that could get both of them killed. 

Kate looks down at her hands lying limp and sticky on her lap. She wants to cry, and she can’t.

“Kate,” Freddie murmurs, “Kate, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry-”.

“It’s not your fault,” she says roughly before clearing her throat and pasting on a quick smile. 

She catches Freddie’s eye briefly and looks down before she can catch herself.

“Oh, it’s- you’re . . . um, still-”

She’s not sure exactly how long it’s supposed to take but it seems like there should have been some effect since he’d obviously finished. But when she looks back up at Freddie he’s staring at her, eyes dilating black again.

“More?” she whispers.

He looks ready to protest, fear and sadness rising behind the black fire in his irises, and Kate swallows harshly and shakes her head.

“We have to get out of here Freddie.”

“Okay,” he whispers, eyes slipping closed for a moment.

She’s already moving, scooting back on her knees and swiping her hand against his jeans. 

She clenches her jaw and catches his eye as she tugs on the waistband of his boxers and he shakes his head again, expression a mixture of desperate and confused. At first it had seemed like he wasn’t quite there behind his eyes, and now she can see him but there’s a layer too of something else, something fogging over and clouding everything she knows about him. She clings to the thought that Freddie is still Freddie, and he still wants to take care of her even now, but she knows too that they can’t both sit there and weep and feel guilty; she doesn’t know how long it might take for the poison to reach its full strength in his veins and take over his brain, his heart, turn his soul as black as his eyes, but she knows the only way she can push off the helplessness is to keep going.

Freddie’s hands wrap in the chains so he can lift his hips and let her pull his jeans down to his thighs and she leaves her hands resting flat there, feels the tense muscles under her palms and the heat, the almost unbearable heat like it should be steaming off of his skin. Something stirs in her, dark and uncomfortable. She doesn’t want to like this in any way, even superficially. Neither of them would have ever chosen this, she doesn’t think, and no matter how Freddie’s body is reacting she can’t let herself think about that meaning anything, about any of it meaning anything after they get out of this cell.

Kate gathers her hair carefully so that it’s tucked behind her ears and leans over him, bracing herself on one forearm, taking his still-hard dick in one hand with her fingers curled loosely at the base, and closing her eyes as she opens her mouth and touches her tongue to the tip. She’s not sure exactly what all she’s supposed to do, what will work, but she tries as best she can to settle on the uncomfortable cold floor and draw some kind of confidence from Freddie’s strangled moan and the rattling of the chains he still has wrapped around his fists. She takes him in, seals her lips and sucks and his hips roll up, pushing him further into her mouth, and she pulls away, startled.

“Is that-?” she asks breathlessly.

“So fucking good,” he grits out.

Kate’s caught frozen in his stare, his voice strained and weak even as his arms flex with his grip on the chains. She leans just slightly forward for a moment but something draws her back again. The black in his eyes is burning with a heat like she’s never seen before and it comes this close to scaring her, to making her doubt everything she’s doing.

“Freddie,” she whispers.

Something flickers in his gaze and he seems to snap back into himself, shakes his head and his brow furrows. The flush on his skin is dark, his eyes empty voids of black, and there’s a strange timbre to his voice even though the inflections are his. She can’t look away, can’t tear her eyes from his for a long moment as he stares back at her, seeming to switch between scared himself and that endless consuming want. She leans back over him, takes him in her mouth again and tentatively seals her lips, swipes her tongue. He makes a rough sound in the back of his throat, like he’s trying to bite it back and failing, and she “mm?”s back questioningly.

“Just . . . like that,” he grits out, and she nods slowly, lets the motion drag him against the soft inside of her cheek and scrape her molars gently, pulling back only when he groans again and his hips tip up.

Kate sucks and licks, stroking along veins and ridges with her tongue, getting lost in the quickening rhythm of his hips jerking and his belly heaving with deep desperate breaths until he’s bucking up deep into her mouth, nearly shouting, the chains rattling, hot liquid thick in a stream from the corner of her mouth where she releases him with a cough at the shock of his come hitting the back of her throat. He sags against the shackles and chains again, sweat glimmering on his brow as Kate sits back and draws the back of her hand across her chin. Her lips feel numb and her tongue strange, like she’s not sure if she’ll be able to make it work right when she needs to speak. For the moment she doesn’t, just catches her breath while Freddie catches his and concentrates on looking anywhere but at him, any of him, either where he’s naked below the waist or at his face flooded with a mixture of pain and relief.

“Oh my god,” he sighs weakly, finally, opening his eyes and looking back at Kate. His head lolls suddenly against the stone wall.

“Freddie? Freddie?” Kate tries to get him to focus on her again. She smacks lightly at his cheek and tugs at his shirt, shaking him, begging, “please, please, you have to stay awake!”

He comes to again, fresh sweat beading on his forehead until she wipes it away. 

“Shouldn’t have to do this,” Freddie repeats, his voice weak and low. 

“You have to be okay,” she whispers, “I don’t care, you just have to be okay.”

She’s not thinking, not trying to convince him of anything, just leans in and presses her mouth to his and lets out a soft sob when he responds, angles his chin to meet her and runs his tongue along her lower lip. She pushes closer without hesitation, one hand fisting in his shirt at his shoulder and the other tugging at the back of his neck, mouth open for him while traces of him are still drying on her chin.

He’s not hers and she knows it, knows they were never supposed to be this way, but if she has to take his body to give him his life back and she will. He’ll let her, she realizes, daring to open her eyes as their kiss breaks and finding him staring at her, straining for her mouth again, his eyes falling closed when she strokes along his forehead and down over his cheek. She touches his mouth, slides her other hand down to his still-hard dick between them and squeezes gently until he moans and shivers. She releases him and goes to unbuckle her belt with shaking hands, and she’s working on the button and fly of her jeans, up on her knees over Freddie when he looks up at her again. He doesn’t argue this time, and she’s almost grateful for it, that he won’t make her convince him again.

“Don’t rush,” he says softly.

“We don’t know how much time-”

“Kate,” he interrupts, waits until she looks him in the eye and it’s him, fully him, for a few long seconds. “Take it slow.”

The words hit her hard and sink in deep and she clenches her teeth until her jaw shakes. She’d been so focused on just muscling through this, keeping her feelings out of the way, that she didn’t stop to think that Freddie, when he’s fully himself, can see it all plainly on her. He knows without being told that she’s never done half of this before. 

She forces a nod and locks eyes with him, holds his gaze while she rises back up slowly to her knees and crawls back enough that she can kneel between his legs and work her jeans down her thighs. He keeps his eyes on her face as she maneuvers to pull off her boots and set them aside, then her jeans. They both glance over her shoulder at the door behind her, still locked and silent. Kate peels her jacket off and wraps it loosely around her hips to cover them both as she settles back over his lap, trembling. It’s dank and cool in the cell surrounded by stone walls, floor, and ceiling but the heat rolling off Freddie’s skin hasn’t lessened and may have intensified, especially now that she’s only half-clothed in underwear, bra, and a tank top. She scratches her nails on the fabric of his shirt, sweat-damp and stretched across his sturdy shoulders.

“Can I-?”

Freddie nods quickly, a corner of his mouth turning up in a slight reassuring smile. 

“Whatever you need, it’s okay.”

She carefully works the buttons on his shirt free one by one until she can brush the halves aside and lay her hands flat on his bare chest, his skin simmering hot, her palms hugging the curves of his musculature. He’s hugged her before, briefly let her cling to him when they couldn’t do anything else against the infuriating mazes of myth and death they’ve been picking through together. She pets anxiously at his shoulders, stares at his chained wrists and swallows.

“I wish your hands were free,” she whispers, sliding a hand lightly over his arm until she can touch the shackle at his wrist.

He curls his fingers in, reaching, and she slides her hand further over his palm so he can clasp her hand in his. He takes a breath, eyes still locked on hers even though she’s watching their hands, slowly threading her fingers through his.

“Yeah,” he answers, voice hoarse and dry, “me too.”

Her eyes snap back to his and and she squeezes his hand, her other clenching on his shoulder too, and suddenly it’s too much and not enough both at once, his eyes boring into hers. She can feel his dick against her stomach, the slight roll of his hips and the little rumble of a response in his chest, stifled and cutoff. She reaches down, given up now on hiding the shaking of her hands and peels her tank top off over her head, drops it to the floor and brushes a strand of hair off her face. His eyes hold on hers almost stubbornly. She shuts hers against his gaze and shakes her head.

“Please just look at me.”

She asked, and he does, gaze falling immediately to take in her soft pale thighs spread over his lap, underwear hugging low on her hips, curved belly below her nipped-in waist, her ribs flaring with each breath, breasts high and firm in the cups of her bra.

“God, Kate,” he whispers, jaw slack as his eyes climb slowly.

She lets her eyes slip closed and tips her forehead against his.

“Thank you,” she breathes, cheeks warm.

“C’mere,” he murmurs back, tipping his chin up just a little, and she nods their mouths together softly.

She can taste the sweat on his upper lip, then his tongue sliding along hers slowly and something breaks inside like ice shattering in her chest, and the heat pouring off of Freddie seems to finally reach a deeper part of her. 

They break apart only to change angles and she slides a hand to the back of his neck and tugs him in further, deepening the kiss and pulling herself a little closer on his lap until his dick nudges between her thighs and she startles with cry in her throat and a rattle of tension. The chains creak and Freddie breaks the kiss again just long enough to whisper, “slow,” at her lips, drawing out the pause just enough that she’s ready and eager when their mouths meet again. 

It doesn’t matter that she’s got his come drying between her fingers, this is suddenly so much more. It doesn’t matter if God’s been watching her and how willing she is to throw her body on this new altar when it’s so easy to crawl over Freddie, stretched wide over his thighs and steadying herself with his broad shoulders, pressing in against his chest. She’d known how solid Freddie is, muscular in a way that isn’t for show, but now she’s running her hands all over his bare chest and stomach and shoulders, gripping at him and sinking herself into the feeling of smallness she gets from being splayed over his body. 

She’d never admitted to herself she looked at Freddie as anything other than a partner, never imagined how he would kiss; deep and purposeful and firm, completely unlike Kyle’s slippery unsure pecking. It’s been so normal to tuck into Freddie’s side like a shadow, lean against his shoulder while they’re pouring over case notes and accept his hand at her back as they go through doorways. She’d let it all go near-completely unexamined because she could; it was safe. Safe, and just nice, that closeness, something simple and grounding when she felt adrift. 

Freddie sucks at her tongue and a moan breaks from deep in her chest, startlingly intense, but he does it again and her hips curl, her fingers dig in and clench at his shoulders and he grunts softly in answer, breaking from her mouth and panting as she presses her temple to his, holds him tightly and curls her hips again and again, rocking against his dick, her chest pressed to his.

“That’s it, keep going,” he murmurs, mouth feathering along her cheek, sending a shiver down her spine that crawls back up when she moves against him just right.

The soft brushes of his mouth turn into kisses again, his tongue on her skin as he trails down her jaw and her neck below her ear, then his lips seal so he can suck lightly and she groans again, head falling back. They’re both breathing hard, paused and frozen for a second before she bows her head again and slowly releases him, scoots back and kneels to tug her underwear off. This time she doesn’t have to ask him to look at her; she can feel his gaze searing her skin but she can’t meet his eyes when she crawls back over him. She stays further back this time, not ready to feel him against her bare, thrown out of the intensity of kissing him now that the momentum has been broken. He seems to understand without her saying anything, gathers it from her bowed head and downturned eyes.

“I’m right here Kate,” he whispers, and he noses at her jaw, kissing again only after she nods in acknowledgement.

She drags her hips up, sliding his dick between her thighs and against her damp curls so that they both gasp and shudder at the contact. She stares down at him as she slithers a hand between them and takes hold of him, trying to swallow down the rock of anxiety in her throat when she nudges the head of his dick in place. Her bravery all leaves her at the feel of it, his body touching hers where no one’s has, on the cusp of moving inside her, and she freezes, thighs trembling and her nails carving into his shoulder where she’s still clinging to him for support.

“Slow, just go slow,” he reminds her, voice strangled and breathy already.

She wants to beg him, anyone, to not make her do this, to undo everything that’s happened to both of them, even just to let her forget about his wife waiting for him somewhere, but there’s nothing except the stone walls he’s chained to and the body she has that she can use to free him. She’d let herself be distracted briefly by his skin, his sounds, and his breath in her mouth, before the illusion broke and she fell back into reality, into the blank sick realization of why this was happening.

Her thighs are starting to shake in her position over him and she knows it’s inevitable anyway, knows she can’t wait forever, and she sinks down a little, wincing as the burning stretch starts. She’d already seen and felt his shape, the weight and width of his dick, but it feels completely different to have it pushing inside her, opening her up around him with an unyielding force she somehow hadn’t expected. She knew the mechanics of course, but the sensation, realizing exactly how hard he is, is startling. All of it is new and it hurts and she knows it isn’t just physical discomfort, knows she can’t make her mind untether from her body entirely and that she has to feel this moment before she can start to try to forget it.

She lets out a harsh short breath and lets go of his dick with her hand to slide down a little further and she can’t bottle the whine of pain when she does, just presses her lips tightly together and closes her eyes and tries to breathe slowly and evenly. Freddie’s chest heaves against hers with his every breath and she can almost hear the grind of his teeth as he clenches his jaw. Finally she settles the rest of the way, presses her hips down and gasps at the sensation, the full realization of it, and she feels almost woozy when she leans her forehead against his again and stays still trying to catch her breath. It hurts but there’s something else, something deeper than she’s ever felt from touching herself, strange and something like pleasure. The little lurch and roll in her stomach could be nausea or arousal, she’s not even sure which is which anymore.

She opens her eyes and unclenches her hands from Freddie’s shoulders to touch his face softly and when he opens his eyes there’s that glazed hungry look in them again, black heat blazing into her. She kisses him without thinking and he’s right there with her immediately, teeth scraping and his tongue delving deep, faster and rougher than before and when he bites and sucks at her lower lip she feels a ripple slide up her muscles and squeeze him inside her and he growls, his hips twitching up and making her cry in shock.

“I can’t-” he grits out, his voice lower than she’s ever heard it and accompanied by a metallic creak not from the chains but from the iron loops themselves that his shackles are connected to.

She clenches and squeezes at him again, feels his dick pulse inside her and a groan rip itself from her throat. The pain is morphing, spreading and changing color in a flood of sensation as she starts to move, and she feels every fraction of an inch inside, tight and foreign and addictive. She could barely look at him before and now she can’t stop watching every small change in his expression, the strain and desperation and slack pleasure. Words fly through her mind, words about what they’re doing, words whispered in school hallways and ones written in seldom-studied passages of scripture and none of them feel like they could describe this: heat and pain and terrifying power when she pushes up far enough on her knees that she can feel the head of his dick stretching at her lips and then lets herself fall back onto him and muffles his shocked groan with her mouth.

The iron creaks again and she glances at one of his shackled wrists, the chains he has looped in his fists and the way his arms are flexing and tugging with his every heaving breath, the clench of his teeth when she’s not kissing him and the vein standing out on his neck. She can feel that black heat from his eyes pouring inside her, wrapping around her heart and blotting out fearful voices chorusing in her head until it’s all just focus and lust and one remaining goal.

“Break them,” she whispers at his ear, rolling up and down his dick almost rhythmically now, hands firm around the back of his neck. “Break them, I want your hands on me,” she repeats, soft and demanding, and there’s a screech from one of the iron loops.

She moves a little faster, a little harder, and it pinches at first, makes her whimper a few times before she starts moaning softly, slowing down again to feel him twitch inside her as the metal groans and Freddie growls.

“Come on Freddie, please. Touch me.”

He sags against the bonds for a moment, forehead falling to her shoulder, weak whimpering sighs with every breath in place of words. Kate strokes the sides of his face and rocks on him gently, runs her hands down his shoulders and his upper arms before cupping his jaw and making him lift his head. 

Seeing his face reminds her all over again who they are and what they’re doing. Everything is still the same even though nothing is still the same; she can taste their freedom and she knows with every heavy racing beat of her heart that no matter what else is true: in this moment he’s hers. And she has to use him.

She touches the shackle around his right wrist, clasps his hand briefly and then takes hold of his chin and makes him focus entirely on her.

“Freddie. Break these chains,” she orders, “and fuck me.”

She cups Freddie’s jaw while she kisses him, chest pressed to his, working him slow and hard with steady rolls of her hips until he breaks the kiss with a shout, the chains rattle and the iron creaks, stone crumbles and falls in chunks to the floor and suddenly his arms are around her and he’s moving beneath her, an earthquake of motion lifting and laying her down, the stone cold and coarse at her back so she shivers and wraps around him, hooks her ankles at the small of his back and hangs on for dear life, her dear, strange and terrible life, as he fucks her. 

 

_

 

After, Kate’s not sure how long she lays on her side on the floor, eyes closed. She feels Freddie cover her with some of their clothes, hears the rustling of him dressing. He kneels next to her and reaches but doesn’t touch her, just murmurs her name, helps her up when she reaches for him, and then turns away while she gets dressed again. Her shirt catches on angry scrapes and welts across her back from the broken bits of stone, pain blurring into numbness quickly.

It’s the Rangers who come for them, later. Freddie hears them first with his ear pressed to the door and backs away, crowds Kate into a corner and stands in front of her, chains dangling in his hands ready to swing.

They’re pulled out, walked through the corridors and into the blinding sunlight at midday and Kate’s eyes don’t stop watering until she’s sitting on a hospital gurney in an exam room, shivering in a paper gown. She refuses a full exam, tells them no one touched her, they just held her in one room for a while before taking her to where they were holding Freddie with no explanation or threat. They ask, over and over, in different ways both disguised and plain, if she was raped. If she was drugged, beaten, touched, if she lost consciousness, how she knows whether or not she lost consciousness, if she had anything to eat or drink or sniffed anything or had anything put on her skin. She tells them no, over and over and over again until they let her leave.

She doesn’t know what Freddie tells the other Rangers, only that they’re both put up in a hotel that night with a two-man twenty-four hour guard detail outside their separate but adjoining rooms. The bag she’d blindly filled with clothes from her house in Bethel the night Scott killed Jessica is sitting on the bed in her room and she mechanically pulls out underwear, leggings, a tank top, and a soft old flannel shirt and leaves them on the sink in the bathroom before standing in the shower until the water turns tepid.

She’s sitting on the end of the bed, dressed, with her hair laying damp on her shoulders, staring at the blank TV screen, when there’s a soft knock on the door to the adjoining room. She watches the door, waits as if it will open itself, but there’s just silence for a few moments before another slightly louder knock and Freddie’s voice, muffled:

“Kate?” 

He’s just continuing, “you don’t have to let me in, I just-” when she opens the door. 

He shoves both hands in the pockets of his jeans. A dark green t-shirt clings to his torso. His hair looks a little spiky, like he’d run his hands through it wet. 

He pauses, glancing over her quickly before he finishes in a quieter voice, “I just wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

It claws in her throat - no no no - but she swallows it down and nods silently, leaning her shoulder on the door frame and looking down at their bare feet against the carpet on either side of the threshold. She feels the divide like a pane of glass standing between them even though all that’s been broken now.

“I don’t know how I feel,” she whispers.

She means it literally, the chains and the heavy locked door to an underground cell, but also the sensations and images she’ll never be able to erase from her memory, never be able to take back. She was never supposed to have touched him that way, looked at him this way; he was supposed to be safe, supposed to fight alongside her and teach her things that had nothing to do with how to make him fall apart while she held his dick in her hand.

She looks back up and meets his sorrowful gaze. “Are you okay?”

He nods and looks away and when he speaks Kate can hear tears in the weak rasp of his voice.

“I couldn’t- it’s like I was there, I was aware of everything, but everything was so intense. I needed it so much and you- part of me was glad . . .” he looks down and kicks lightly at the threshold, “the thought, of it being anybody else in there with you-”

The words pass through Kate like a cold wind and Freddie freezes, realizing it too. She can see him crumbling again, letting go of whatever shield of nobility he’d been clutching to make it somehow less awful in his head, to try and take care of her as if that would make him okay. 

“Shit, I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean I was glad, I shouldn’t have-

“Freddie,” Kate says softly, closing her eyes. She shakes her head a little. “Don’t apologize anymore, okay? They used you. They were going to kill you, and here was nothing else we could do. There’s nothing you could have done. You’re okay, we got out. That’s all that matters now.”

Her voice sounds hollow even to her own ears and then the silence hangs over them like a blanket, so present Kate can feel it weighing over her head and shoulders and it’s suffocating but almost comforting in its strength as her ears start to ring. Her eyes feel hot and swollen and she knows her skin is blotchy and tear-stained but he looks at her, eyes roaming her face, and she looks back and suddenly she can see him pounding into her on that dirty stone floor, her cries and his grunts echoing off the walls. Kate squeezes her eyes shut and swallows around the painful jagged lump in her throat. Her skin itches and aches and goosebumps spring up all over her scalp and down her arms and her mouth runs dry. She clenches her teeth and shakes away the image, forces herself to look up at Freddie again, forces herself to hold his gaze until the panic washes away.

He’s reaching tentatively, watching her and looking nervous. “Can I-” Freddie asks.

Kate nods before bowing her head low to nudge her forehead against his shoulder, reassuring herself of his solidness and sighing when he rests a hand on the back of her neck and squeezes gently, his fingers sliding into her hair. She reaches up and holds onto his arms, closes her eyes and tries to center herself. She feels every inch where they’re touching, the nervous sweat gathering at her hairline, and a soft insistent tug to move closer that she follows, letting the weight of his hand resting where her neck meets her shoulder bring her closer, his skin rough and warm against hers.

“Will you come in? Please?”

Freddie nods and waits for her to step aside before moving through the doorway and into the room. Kate goes and sits on the end of the bed again, hands sandwiched flat between her knees and Freddie stays standing, leaning against the wall next to the doorway, watching her. She shakes her head, trying to clear it, trying to feel anything other than uneasy and small. She catches Freddie’s eye again, a rueful dark smile pressing into her mouth. It feels wrong but she can’t make it go away. Freddie looks away first.

“Wanna talk about something else? Take . . . take your mind off it?”

“The case?” she asks.

Freddie shrugs, nods. Kate shifts and he leans slowly off the wall and crosses the space to sit next to her on the end of the bed, easing down carefully far away enough that they’re not touching. It passes through her mind fleetingly that he wouldn’t have bothered sitting that far away before. He leans forward, forearms on his knees and his hands folding and unfolding in front of him. She stares ahead at the blank wall next to the doorway into Freddie’s room, back straight, hands fidgeting slowly in her lap for a few moments.

“I don’t- I hardly know anything about you,” Freddie says.

“I thought we were talking about the case,” she answers softly.

“I don’t wanna talk about the case.”

She smiles, barely, and there’s an itch through Kate’s fingers to touch him, rest her hand on the bulk of his solid shoulder. It might have been strange, she realizes suddenly, how easily they slotted into each other’s space before. Heads down over old case notes at his desk, she fit perfectly at his side and neither of them paused a moment reaching over each other to turn pages or scratch out new notes.

Freddie has his head in his hands now. “I could feel how scared you were and it- I feel sick, thinking about it.”

She startles a bit at his vehemence. “It wasn’t you I was scared of, you know that right?”

Freddie shrugs and nods and she’s not sure how to take that, if he could really understand how things had always felt solid and safe with him before. How that was what she had clung to throughout the whole time in the cell.

“I’m- I’m glad it was you,” she says softly. 

She reaches over and puts her hand on his knee gently even as he’s shaking his head.

“Don’t, you don’t have to say that, you’re-”

“Freddie. I am. I mean it’s not like . . . I just am. Okay?”

He reaches up and clasps her hand in both of his and her whole body feels dwarfed in his touch, cradled. The room is airless around them, every whisper of movement suddenly loud and bright and monumental. She leans into him, rests her chin on his shoulder, and he tips his head so that his temple nudges her nose. She closes her eyes and breathes in, smells the hotel soap, the warm sunny cotton of his t-shirt, and a vague wisp of cordite. He takes a breath too and she feels the shakiness of his inhale and the clench of his jaw.

“Stay here,” she whispers, “please?”

Freddie reaches out and brushes a strand of hair away from her temple and Kate turns into his touch for a moment and closes her eyes. When she opens them he’s watching her, his face open and soft, surprised.

“You want me to?” he asks.

Kate can feel the moment crystallizing around her, can feel the flash of nervousness as something she can choose to take as a warning or simply a reaction, one that doesn’t have anything to do with saving her life. She’s not sure if it makes sense, how safe she still feels with him, how much she wants to lean into his body, curl up with him surrounding her, and rest. 

“There are so many terrible things . . . things we don’t have any control over, that we just have to look in the eye and fight however we can,” she takes a deep wavering breath and tips her forehead against Freddie’s. “It was never supposed to be like that with us, we weren’t-” her voice falters, “and I don’t- I don’t know if we can ever be the same as before. But that . . . what we did, that doesn’t have to be us. That poison is gone now. We did that, we saved you, together. You’re okay, we’re- we’re both gonna be okay.”

“Okay,” he murmurs, echoing her and agreeing. Belatedly he smiles, and catches her eye.

“What?” Kate asks, starting to smile herself.

“Look evil in the eye and spit.”

“What?”

“A Ranger’s job. To look evil in the eye and spit. S’what Earl used to-”

Kate summons half a smile, nodding. “I remember.”

They’re still closer than close, tucked against each other at the foot of the bed, and a weighted silence falls over them, soft smiles still pressed onto their mouths. Kate ducks her head again and rests her forehead on his shoulder.

“Come lay down,” she murmurs.

He follows her obediently, crawling up over the blankets until they rest, sharing a pillow, and Kate curls into him. Seconds tick slow, too slow, and she can’t settle at first, but Freddie shifts occasionally, sighing, and eventually he reaches an arm around her waist, anchoring her close. She tries to match her breathing to his, to crawl back into the corners of her body she’s been shying away from for hours upon hours.

“I didn’t think this is what my life would be like,” she says softly, finally.

It’s an understatement beyond the farthest reaches of the term, but Freddie doesn’t laugh at the patent absurdity. He ducks his chin just enough to press his lips to her hair.

It’s the moment the stinging ache behind her eyes finally gives way to tears, wide hot streams down her cheeks and she squirms closer, grips at his arms and hooks one ankle around his to press herself to his body and bury her face in his neck. He wraps her up tightly in his arms, so tight that it hurts, feels like she could be crushed against the force of him, this man she rescued from death and possession.

“You saved me,” he murmurs, gently dislodging her to turn her face up to his, wide hand spanning her cheek and jaw, “you saved me and we’re both alive and-”

She surges the few inches between them and kisses him, lips swollen and framed by trails of tears, and she’s still crying, reaching up to grip the collar of his shirt and his hair and drag him deeper into it, though it barely takes any strength. He’s there, diving into her, gathering her closer, kissing her back, breathing into her and taking her murmuring sobs into his own mouth.

She breaks the kiss suddenly, before her own instincts even kick in to remind her to feel overwhelmed. She stays there, forehead to forehead with Freddie, sharing air, clutching at each other.

“Don’t erase me,” she whispers.

“What?”

“Don’t- don’t push it away. I know- you have . . . just please don’t pretend it never happened. I know we’re not like that, I know it won’t be, I don’t want that, just . . . don’t erase me,” she repeats.

Freddie exhales, closes his eyes briefly.

“I won’t. I couldn’t. I won’t forget,” Freddie whispers, leaning down and kissing a tear rolling down just off the corner of her eye. “I won’t ever try to forget you.”

Kate closes her eyes and her brow starts to crumple again, leftover tears springing up. She feels herself lagging now, exhaustion finally starting to take over, and she accepts the soft kiss Freddie presses to her lips with a little murmur of acknowledgement.

“Okay?” Freddie asks softly, and she nods, wriggles in once more and rests her forehead against his chest.

Kate doesn’t remember falling asleep, doesn’t remember her dreams, doesn’t remember rolling away from Freddie during the night, or him following and curling around her back with an arm around her waist.

She wakes slowly, dry mouthed with her eyes puffy. She twists at the waist and sees Freddie, still asleep at first but he starts stirring a moment later. Kate turns back before Freddie opens his eyes and sits up slowly, letting his hand fall away from her stomach. She feels shaky when she stands, her knees weak and her head swims with her first few steps. 

The fluorescent light in the bathroom buzzes when she turns it on and steps toward the sink and the mirror above it. She examines her face, pale and swollen. She reaches out and places a hand against her reflection’s cheek, slides a fingertip through a dried salt trail under one eye. There’s a movement over her shoulder and she meets Freddie’s eye in the mirror as he sits up and orients himself, watches her quietly. She meets her own eyes in the mirror again, tired, but clear and glittering.


End file.
